Weird would be an
understatement for this movie. I most likely had a constant “what
the fuck?” expression on my face while watching this one. These
“fumetti” (Italian term for comics for adults) adaptations were
very popular in the late 60's and early 70's and this movie is among
the better ones of it's kind. The movie starts out with probably the
weirdest scene I have ever seen, I still can't understand what it was
about, but there's some half naked people playing Native-Americans
and some cowboys driving in cars killing each other and some Jesus
impersonator burning American flag until the police come to stop it
all. I guess it was some kind of reality theater or something, all I
know is I couldn't understand it at all. Anyway that's soon forgotten
after the titles and the actual story is about Valentina (Isabelle De
Funes), a photographer who gets her camera spellbound by a witch
called Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker). The people who get photographed by
the camera seem to end up hurt or dead. Then there's Arno (George
Eastman) a director friend of Valentina and a living doll called
Annette, played by the great Ely Galleani. And then things get very
weird, can't say much about it in fear of spoiling it, but then again
I didn't really understand most of it anyway so I guess it doesn't
matter one way or the other. Anyway I really liked the haunting mood
of the movie and the seemingly nonsense script actually made it even
more intense. The movie looked great and there's some very nice shots
as you'd expect from Italian genre films, but the use of music
surprisingly wasn't that impressive. I mean it wasn't bad, but
definitely not great either. This Shameless release of the film was a
bit confusing as it's a restored director's cut of the movie and it's
made mainly from an English print and the cut parts are added from a
lesser quality Italian print with an Italian soundtrack. So from time
to time the picture quality goes down and people just start to talk
Italian and then switch back to English. It's actually not as
distracting as it sounds, even though it was extremely notable, after
all it's better to see the director's original vision than some cut
done by a studio. Fumetti friends will get more out of this movie
than I did, I was surely intrigued and mostly entertained throughout
it, but in the end it left me with a ton of questions and not much
else to go with.
69%
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